The Blind and Blindness in Literature of the Romantic Period
Publisher: Edinburgh University Press
Published: July 15, 2007
Language: eng
Format: Hardcover
Number of pages: 240
ISBN-13: 9780748632817
Subjects: Literary studies: 19th century; Literary Criticism; Literature - Classics / Criticism; English; Gothic & Romance; Regional, Ethnic, Genre, Specific Subject; Literary Criticism & Collections / Gothic & Romance; 19th century; Blind in literature; Blindness in literature; English literature; History and criticism
Description: "In the first full-length literary-historical study of its subject, Edward Larrissy examines the philosophical and literary background to representations of blindness and the blind in the Romantic period. In detailed studies of literary works he goes on to show how the topic is central to an understanding of British and Irish Romantic literature." "Larrissy finds that, despite the nostalgia for a bardic age of inward vision, the chief emphasis in the period is on the compensations of enhanced sensitivity to music and words. This compensation becomes associated with the loss and gain involved in the modernity of a post-bardic age. Representations of blindness and the blind are found to elucidate a tension at the heart of the Romantic period, between the desire for immediacy of vision on the one hand and, on the other, the historical self-consciousness which always attends it."--Jacket.